68 



The Solar Theory of Myths. 



eliminated, certain common characteristics remained. 

 These became regarded as essentials, about which were 

 clustered the minutiae which caused the one to differ from 

 the other. As might have been expected, it was also 

 found that, the nearer we approached the infancy of races, 

 the more these tales lost of their peculiar and non-essential 

 characteristics; thus plainly hinting that their common 

 origin would be discovered by examining their earliest 

 forms, and also that, the more primitive the source from 

 which they were taken, the more vivid and reliable would 

 be the marks of their original. In India a sacred litera- 

 ture, dating back more than two thousand years before 

 the Christian era, preserved in transparent form the myths 

 so strangely and variously colored in later times, and in 

 the earliest forms of Vedic allegory was the solution found. 



In the Sanscrit tales, so fully explained by De G-ubernatis, 

 the hero is indifferently a personification of the sun in his 

 celestial course, the bright godlndra, prototype of Phoibos 

 Apollo, or the bull, the Indian emblem of divinity.^ In 

 short, the sun in his course through the heavens was the 

 one object that, riveting the attention of the infant race, 

 had ages before been personified as deity and transformed 

 into the varied symbols under which he was worshiped. 

 Appearing full orbed from the gloom of night, chasing 

 away the darkness that flees before him, triumphing as 

 conqueror in his noontide march, doomed to die in the 

 Western ocean and fated to reappear with the morn, he 

 is seen to combine the unvarying characteristics of the 

 heroic forms we have just considered. Of hidden birth 

 and unknown childhood, from the obscurity in which his 

 youth is passed he appears as the full grown prince ; oene- 

 factor of the world, he conquers the storm and dispels the 

 clouds; then, by a mysterious fate, sinks into the waters 

 of the West, ever to reappear and rescue the world from 

 gloom. His anti-type and weaker self appears in the moon , 



1 De Gubematis — Zoological Mythology, p. 12 et passim. 



